Date published: 2008/11/26
The BBC says:
Controversial pay-as-you-throw schemes could be an acceptable answer to Britain's 15 million tonne mountain of household waste according to a survey for BBC News.
From January English councils will be able to bid for pilot schemes to incentivise people for recycling more and deter them from throwing stuff away.
Previous pay-as-you-throw pilots were abandoned, but the survey showed 79% of women and 70% of men saying they should be rewarded financially if they create less waste and recycle more.
A much narrower majority - 55% of women and 50% of men - said it was only fair they should pay more if they throw away more.
The poll of 1,000 people by NOP offers some encouragement to the British government, which is encouraging councillors to try pay-as-you-throw pilots. Europe is running out of landfill sites and all nations face targets to increase the amount they recycle into new materials.
Needless to say, you can get any answer you want in a survey, just by posing questions in a certain way. The BBC has not released the questions asked in the survey, not to mention the full data set, so there is no way to see if there is any bias in the way the survey was conducted or analysed. Further, what people say in a survey like this has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Surprise, people will tell interviewers that they are good citizens. (It's just everyone else who is not.)
And the real problem with this article is that the BBC, like most of the academic middle class, is convinced that landfill is somehow inherently evil, and recycling is somehow inherently holy. Neither statement is correct. All waste disposal, whether by landfill or recycling or incineration, comes at a cost. So all waste should carry a cost. Whether it is sensible (i.e. practical) to do "pay-as-you-throw" instead of a fixed charge as now is another question. The BBC didn't bother to investigate that either, instead sticking with the usual simplistic academic middle class view of the world.
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